Abstract [en]

It is well-known that in the presence of super-refractive layers in the lower-tropospheric inversion of GNSSradio occultation (RO) measurements using the Abel trans-form yields biased refractivity profiles. As such it is problem-atic to reconstruct the true refractivity from the RO signal.Additional information about this lower region of the atmo-sphere might be embedded in reflected parts of the signal. Toretrieve the bending angle, the phase matching operator canbe used. This operator produces a complex function of theimpact parameter, and from its phase we can calculate thebending angle. Instead of looking at the phase, in this paperwe focus on the function’s amplitude. The results in this pa-per show that the signatures of surface reflections in GNSSRO measurements can be significantly enhanced when usingthe phase matching method by processing only an appropri-ately selected segment of the received signal. This signatureenhancement is demonstrated by simulations and confirmedwith 10 hand-picked MetOp-A occultations with reflectedcomponents. To validate that these events show signs of re-flections, radio holographic images are generated. Our resultssuggest that the phase matching amplitude carries informa-tion that can improve the interpretation of radio occultationmeasurements in the lower troposphere.